25 Best Places to Find a Freelancer
If you have been struggling with questions such as how to find a freelancer or where to find a web developer, graphical artist or PPC specialist the chances are you will find your answers here. Please see below the list of 25 best places to find freelancers and small companies providing a broad variety of services. This list links you to the 25 most popular freelancing directories, market places and other sites frequented by freelancers. These websites give you the access to great variety of talent such as Programmers (Web developers, Software developers, Mobile and Database specialists, etc.), Graphic Designers, Writers, Marketing and Advertising specialists, SEO/SEM/SMM, Legal gurus, virtual assistants, data entry specialists, and so on.
If none of these 25 sites provide you with what you are looking take a look at full lists of sites I put together sorted by Site Name, Alexa rating and Alexa US rating. BTW, Alexa rating is a great indicator of site popularity, the rating is calculated based on several components such as traffic to the website.
If you know of a site, directory or service with is worth including please comment on the page and I include it in the list, feel free also email me at krym2000-po @ yahoo . com as well. I will update the list in ~ 12 months from now.
| Site Name | PR | Alexa Global |
Alexa US |
Brief Description |
| www.99designs.com | 7 | 1,893 | 1,418 | 99designs is one of the top marketplaces for crowdsourced graphic design. As of June ’10 it connects 70,406 passionate designers from around the globe with small businesses who need design projects completed. |
| www.agentsolo.com | 6 | 114,934 | 2,338 | AgentSolo.com was developed and is currently operated by Netsym communication inc. It was established in 2002 to facilitate the negotiation of professional services between “Solo Agents” and “Buyers” (businesses or individuals who need their services). |
| www.allfreelancework.com | 5 | 59,775 | 8,377 | AllFreelanceWork.com is a central information base for freelancers to find everything that they could need all in one place – online freelance ezine, job site, and portfolio provider all in one. |
| www.contractedwork.com | 5 | 228,269 | 124,045 | Contracted Work is a website that brings together business owners looking to outsource jobs and freelancers looking to bid on work. They act as a liaison for both sides of contracted work and they also assure compliance on both sides by holding all payments in escrow, thereby assuring that each member of the contract receives exactly what was agreed upon. |
| www.coroflot.com | 6 | 7,125 | 3,831 | Coroflot claims to be the largest, most established, most diverse pool of professional creative portfolios in the world. Since going live in 1998, Coroflot has grown to host over 1.2 million images of creative work, from the portfolios of over 120,000 creative professionals and students from nearly every country on earth. |
| www.craigslist.org | 7 | 35 | 10 | Craigslist is probably the world’s most popular classified ad site. Jobs and Gigs sections provide access to vast community of local talent with Gigs primarily focused on freelancers. Conveniently Gigs are free to post. |
| www.designquote.net | 5 | 40,406 | 11,920 | DesignQuote Connects Clients and Designers (web and graphic designers/programmers) worldwide. |
| www.elance.com | 6 | 329 | 242 | Elance is an online workplace where businesses find and hire people “on demand” to get work done quickly and cost effectively. Founded in 1999, Elance was established to help small businesses easily and efficiently hire freelance talent. Today, it’s claiming to be the leading workplace for hiring and working on demand. |
| www.getacoder.com | 5 | 25,777 | 8,112 | GetACoder claims to be a leading Global Services Marketplace doing business in more than 200 countries. GetACoder strives to make outsourcing to any part of the world an easy task. Using GetACoder supposedly offers saving as much as 60% over traditional outsourcing, I doubt that it includes other companies in this list. |
| www.GetAFreelancer.com aka www.Freelancer.com | 6 | 35,223 | 22,871 | GetAFreelancer.com claims to be one of the largest sites of its kind. It indeed earned a decent reputation in freelancing community. You can find a large number of freelance programmers, web designers, copywriters and translators at that site. |
| www.guru.com | 7 | 2,535 | 1,576 | Guru.com claims to be the world’s largest online marketplace for freelance talent. Through their service, employers find freelance and contract talent locally, nationally, or globally. Created in August of 2000, Guru.com’s web-based marketplace directly connects businesses with over 629,000 professionals who specialize in over 160 professional categories including: website design, programming, graphic design, business consulting, and administrative support. |
| www.freelancers.net | 5 | 90,749 | 5,973 | Freelancers.net is UK focused and lists many jobs and projects open to UK freelancers and clients from across the globe. It has been helping freelancers find work and clients find freelancers since 1999 and it maintains an open database of UK and global Internet freelancers. |
| www.freelancewriting.com | 6 | 64,131 | 21,185 | FreelanceWriting.com claims to be the #1 source for freelance writing jobs.They’ve been delivering daily and real-time freelance writing jobs for freelance writers since 1997. |
| www.freelanceswitch.com | 6 | 5,847 | 4,322 | FreelanceSwitch is a site for freelancers. It offers a great access to the resources through its Job Board. |
| www.freelance.com | 6 | 34,315 | 35,465 | Freelance.com provides the fastest and most efficient means of identifying qualified professionals for project based needs or long-term activities anywhere in the world, anytime. |
| www.Hiretheworld.com | 5 | 339,429 | 158,794 | Hiretheworld claims to be the world’s best process for logo, website and graphic design projects. Its global service marketplace allows businesses and individuals to hire, manage, and pay remote freelancers or teams located in 140+ countries. |
| www.ifreelance.com | 5 | 21,313 | 13,208 | iFreelance.com claims to be the easiest and most effective way for businesses to connect with talented freelance professionals from around the world. True or not it offers a large variety of talent – from artists and photographers to programmers and writers. iFreelance.com also claims that by outsourcing through them businesses typically get projects done in half the time at half the cost. |
| www.jobbi.com | 4 | 248,654 | 77,249 | Jobbi is an employment website site founded in 2007 by Lawrence Vaughan in Las Vegas, NV. It currently focuses on finding US and international employees/jobs making it simple, efficient and free. |
| www.krop.com | 6 | 36,617 | 11,196 | Started in 2000 as a private mailing list of top designers, Krop became a Job Board and career resource website for creative professionals helping each other find great jobs. |
| www.odesk.com | 6 | 451 | 370 | oDesk enables buyers to hire, manage (that’s different from many other similar services), and pay technology service providers from around the world. The service is fairly well organized, fast and reasonably priced – that’s if you are prepared to pay fees. Last time I looked at it the brokerage fees were 10% of the contract. |
| www.peopleperhour.com | 4 | 4,284 | 301 | PeoplePerHour connects you with a vibrant community of 38714 independent, reliable service providers (Freelancers) across 150 countries available to work for you at the click of a button. It’s like having a virtual, on-demand, global workforce at your fingertips that you can scale up or down as you need, giving you the flexibility to expand your business cost-effectively. |
| www.proz.com | 6 | 2,848 | 6,860 | ProZ.com’s mission is to provide tools and opportunities that translators, translation companies, and others in the language industry can use to: network, expand their businesses, improve their work and experience added enjoyment in their professional endeavors. |
| www.scriptlance.com | 5 | 3,053 | 705 | Scriptlance.com looks like a fairly busy site with focus on programming. It’s motto is connecting businesses with programmers and it claims to have thousands of professionals and over 200 projects daily. |
| www.sologig.com | 7 | 30,443 | 7,421 | Sologig is the preeminent resource to find full-time and part-time contract and consulting opportunities. Employers are searching Sologig for experienced professionals across various industries including IT, Healthcare, Engineering, Accounting, Sales & Marketing, etc. |
| www.translatorscafe.com | 6 | 16,217 | 14,800 | TranslatorsCafé is a free database of over 1300 translation agencies and freelance translators. |
| www.rentacoder.com | 6 | 218,028 | 75,823 | The site has about 20,000 registered buyers and great number of developers. When you get a project done through Rentacoder you put the entire project fees into an escrow account. You don’t release the fees until the project is complete. |
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Hi-
I think I’d add TheSuperlancers to your list here. I’d like to see a list of places you use, this is my main one besides Project4Hire.
Anyway, here’s that one you missed: http://www.thesuperlancers.com
Tons of cheap coders and designers, markerters, writers, whatever, but more programmers than projects for now so it’s probably a good time to fish for new coders and designers. I do. ;)
Hope that helps!
Jay
Comment by Jay | March 9, 2009
Thank Jay, just added the site to the list. Appreciate the help! nick
Comment by Nick Krym | March 10, 2009
The only site I have used successfully is Guru.com. I have been able to find quality people rather easily.
Comment by Simon | March 10, 2009
Thanks Simon, my experience with Guru has been quite positive as well. nick
Comment by Nick Krym | March 10, 2009
i think scriptlance.com is missed
Comment by Free Online Games | March 12, 2009
Great compendium, Nick. I like the idea of providing a summary description for each site.
Comment by Abbas | March 12, 2009
Thanks Abbas, i wish WP supported user rating / comments for entries. But the only way to get there is hosting your own version + mods.
Comment by Nick Krym | March 12, 2009
Thanks! It is missing indeed, I will add it shortly.
Comment by Nick Krym | March 12, 2009
Hi Nick,
Thanks for pointing me to this article, it’s good to know what is out there.
I think http://www.expertMagnet.com differs from most of the others by having a reverse auction structure, where buyers can post a detailed request on what they need, and vendors can reply to that with a tailored response.
Additionally, it focuses only on the Tertiary industry (the ‘knowledge economy’), and avoids the Secondary industry (manufacturing), where alibaba.com has a fairly strong foothold.
Regards,
Mark
Comment by Mark Bubner | March 18, 2009
[...] put a project request on several freelancing sites (see those plus more on my list of places to find freelancers). I got more offers that I could look at in just a few days. The price varied from $2 to $50 an [...]
Pingback by Slowing Down, no Intentions to Stop « Pragmatic Outsourcing | March 24, 2009
[...] are many places where you can find freelancers. Most of those places offer offshore labor. Even local resources such as craigslist will generate [...]
Pingback by Notes from a Data Entry Gig « Pragmatic Outsourcing | April 23, 2009
add one more but they allow only Enterprises to dealt with – http://www.outsourcingdeals.com and it is not just IT.
Comment by Sanjay Verma | September 3, 2009
Nick:
Nicely collated list…thank you so much.
BR,
Manu
Comment by Manu | September 4, 2009
Hi, I only knew about elance and getafreelancer. List is great. I have also heard that there are country-specific sites that are like local versions of craigslist where people can post jobs and get help. Certain countries have a stronger outsource/free lance community than others.
Comment by Vance | November 24, 2009
[...] 1. Website development. If website is primitive, it takes just knowledge of MS word and few clicks to create a website. If you have no clue how to do even that you should spend a few hours googling, otherwise you are leaving yourself wide open to fraud and over-billing. If the website is very simple yet above a one-pager you probably will spend more time explaining to VA what you want then creating it yourself using DreamWeaver or FrontPage, and if website is a bit higher in complexity you will be lucky to get your money and time worth by working with VA. Find professionals – there are plenty of them (see ideas on how to find one in Best Places to Find a Freelancer. [...]
Pingback by Things Not to Outsource Even Though They You Should « Pragmatic Outsourcing | December 13, 2009
Hi
This is a great list…. I want to add the http://www.auctionsforbusiness.com/ which has a number of freelance projects posted..
thx
Comment by melbel | December 30, 2009
[...] to the List of Freelancing Sites In case you found Best Places to Find a Freelancer helpful you may want to check out updated list. It now has XX entries and also have Google PR and [...]
Pingback by Updates to the List of Freelancing Sites « Pragmatic Outsourcing | February 2, 2010
Hi Nick,
Just come across this list via Guru->Twitter…Thanks for taking the time to compile it.
Would it be possible to add our site http://www.theragtrader.com ?
We have a similar model to Guru, etc, but only focus on the fashion industry. The site is run by people with a lot of experience working within fashion so we offer a more tailored experience (no pun intended!).
Comment by Steven | February 24, 2010
will do; thanks for the note
Comment by Nick Krym | February 24, 2010
Hi Nick,
Found your site looking for “easy outsourcing” and have been finding a lot of great content here. Might I suggest my company for your list: easyoutsource.com is new (just launched about 3 months ago) and focuses on the Philippines. We’re a good place to find bloggers, WordPress programmers, and general personal assistance.
Comment by Matt | February 28, 2010
will do; best of luck; nick
Comment by Nick Krym | March 2, 2010
[...] core activities. Many companies struggle to find freelancers on the open internet [...]
Pingback by Struggling To Find Freelancers? | Berrian | April 14, 2010
[...] activities. Many companies struggle to find freelancers on the open internet [...]
Pingback by Dykr Blog » Struggling To Find Freelancers? | April 14, 2010
Hi Nick,
Thanks for compiling this list, there are a hell of a lot of great sites in the list. I would like to submit our website for your consideration – http://www.99designs.com, We are the biggest crowdsourcing community online (By contests, Alexa and other metrics)
Hope you keep up the good work, the easier it is for people to find these resources, the better the industry as a whole becomes.
Thanks,
Kristen
Comment by Kristen | May 3, 2010
Will do, thanks for submit Kristen
Comment by Nick Krym | May 4, 2010
I have been working mturk.com and I am looking for more data entry if you know of any could you please list more thanks.
Comment by shannon | July 13, 2010
I would like to recommend another site for freelance work.
http://www.ITeezy.com
It allows you to post your services at fixed rate and offers bunch of other tools.
Comment by Mat | August 13, 2010
I would like to add SriLance.com to your list.
http://www.SriLance.com
You can find freelancers for free of charge
Comment by Kewsey Riz | August 20, 2010
I would like to add http:www.onlinejobs.ph
You can have competitive clients and workforce to work with any SEO related jobs.
Comment by Stickymedia | December 7, 2010
I have found success on vworker but recently have run in to issues with them and the customer service, etc. I began browsing for new places and found http://www.ataskfreelancer. I think it’s worth mentioning on this list – I’ve already signed up and placed bids, they have free registration as they just recently launched so I think it’s worth a shot :)
Comment by Elizabeth | January 18, 2011
You should add FreelanceYourEbook.com to the list. Free to the clients, specifically for ebooks and misc eProjects, and writers go through a screening process to ensure they are of high quality. Also, the writers don’t need to pay monthly members and have unlimited bids.
Comment by Stephanie | March 20, 2011
Hi,
You may include http://www.zylun.com which is most popular for IT Outsourcing.
Thanks,
Larry
Comment by Larry | March 27, 2011
Also do not forget about 99Desk.com. I have used them in the past with great success. http://www.99desk.com
Comment by Marra | April 29, 2011
Hi,
Would you be so kind to include http://www.freelancersoutpost.com , the premium freelancers marketplace?
Thanks,
Comment by Albert | June 20, 2011
I think you may have forgotten Hiretheworld.com… Their customer service is excellent and I’ve never had any problems with posting/updating job postings… As you can see its highly recommended :P
cheers,
Comment by Emily | July 22, 2011
New Website to find freelancers a tradesman or local services post your job at your budget freelancers tradesmen and service providers bid on your job giving you huge savings also find freelance job tradesman jobs and local service jobs NO COMMISSIONS only pay small fee if you win the bid http://www.jobsbidder.com or http://www.jobsbidder.com.au register free post jobs free try now
Comment by Jobsbidder | July 29, 2011
there is the new website http://www.hireawebprogrammer.com.au you can hire a web programmer web designer freelancer post jobs free get quotes find web programmer job freelance jobs
Comment by Jobsbidder | September 14, 2011
Excellent advise for the freelancer. Great insight.
http://postsandbids.com | Freelance Community
Comment by PostsandBids Freelancing | October 11, 2011
You can include also http://www.freelancerland.com which is new site but highly motivated team to serve the freelancers and employers
Comment by A. Mandar | November 10, 2011
I want to added a small site but heavy powerful for micro freelancer.url- http://fiverr.com
Comment by childish on fiverr | November 13, 2011
Great list, I also use HTML Jobs Finder, free to post
Comment by Alex | November 15, 2011
It was an really useful resource. Some sites are best doing in freelancing jobs. I work on http://www.3to30.com/ which is pretty new micro jobs marketplace. I posted 5 micro services related to writing, proofreading, data entry. 3 out 5 is best moving.
Comment by Katie | November 18, 2011
I’m working on a way to incorporate very personalized video that can be embedded onto freelancers’ personal websites, shared on Facebook / Twitter, e-mailed to friends and potential clients, etc – a way to promote a freelancer’s portfolio and personal brand.
If this is something that anyone here might find useful, why don’t you check it out at: http://seemehearme.motionthink.com and let us know what you think?
It would be great to have more off-the-shelf tools for us freelancers to use to get more consistent work, and we hope we can assist in that effort. :)
Comment by Andrew | January 5, 2012
This is an awesome list of freelance web sites. For the first time I was able to do a good comparison study. Thanks for sharing this.
Comment by Alex-SEO Ireland | January 16, 2012
Website for finding freelancers find freelance jobs with no commissions pay only if you win the the job there are also categories of tradesmen and hundreds of other services
Comment by Kane | January 31, 2012